From its name you can glean that Eisinger uses the article to
ponder why only one high-level banker went to jail for crimes
committed before the financial crisis.

The banker, Kareem Serageldin, is as much a side show in the
story on the page as he is in the story playing out in real life.
The real action (or inaction) takes place at the Justice
Department and centers around the evolving nature of its strategy
for prosecuting high-powered criminals.

Eisinger reports that what was once a department that went after
executives with gusto — think: Enron — became a department
obsessed with winning. Even if those wins are empty. In the
1990s, over 17% of all federal cases were for white-collar
criminals, he points out. And by 2012 that number was down to
9.4%.

He even got Preet Bharara, the 80-0 New York prosecutor known for
striking terror into the hearts of hedge fund managers, to admit
to this problem.

The former prosecutor was almost sheepish about the
insider-trading cases when I spoke to him: “They made our
careers, but they don’t change the world.” In fact, several
former prosecutors in the office told me that going after bankers
was never a real priority. “The government failed,” another
former prosecutor said. “We didn’t do what we needed to
do.”

The whole article is worth a read, but it's a handful, so
you may want to bookmark it for some solid free time.

Until then, here are five things you need to know about what
Eisinger found in his reporting.

There's a pendulum swing thing going on here. The
white-collar guys at the DOJ were inspired by their colleagues
who took down the mob. That's why when a man who had worked under
Rudy Giuliani named Michael Chertoff became the criminal chief of
the DOJ in 2001, the agency was ready for war.

When Chertoff went after Arthur Anderson hard for its role in
disguising Enron's fraud, there was a backlash. Corporate
America, and even some prosecutors, thought Chertoff had
overstepped his bounds.

Corporate attorneys started figuring out ways to protect
their clients. They were trying to counter the 'Thompson Memo',
a strategy written by then-Deputy Attorney General Larry
Thompson. Basically he gave corporations carrots for rolling
back the attorney client privileges that protected them.
Because of the backlash, however, the memo has been all but
rolled back, according to Eisinger.

In 2003 there was a turning point. The Fed stepped in while
the DOJ was prosecuting PNC Financial Services, and asked for a
meeting with Chertoff, where Chertoff told then-Fed
official Herbert Biern that: "if the DOJ 'can’t bring these
cases because it may bring harm, then maybe these banks are too
big.'" Sound familiar?

After that, they deferred and non-prosecution agreements
started pouring out of the DOJ. There were 242 from 2004-2012.
There had been 26 in the previous 12 years.